"In every case, the expectations by faculty of what they believe college freshmen should have read in high school exceeds the reality of what they've actually read," said Tom Kelly, a Siena College history professor emeritus. He conducted the survey with Douglas Lonnstrom, director of the Research Institute.

"There's a continuity of decline," Kelly said. "When you get to the bottom 10 of the 30 books, they're being read by fewer and fewer students."

For example, Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" was read by only 3 percent of freshmen surveyed, Tolstoy's "War and Peace" by 4 percent and Aristotle's "Politics" by 5 percent. The Bible dropped from 80 percent to 56 percent between 1985 and 2006 among surveyed faculty who recommended that freshmen should have read the Scriptures in high school.

Among novels read by freshmen, "Great Expectations" and "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens and George Orwell's "1984" dropped the most, with double-digit declines from 1985.

On the upside, the survey revealed a Brad Pitt factor and the power of Hollywood.

Kelly attributed sharp increases among students surveyed regarding those who've read Homer's "Odyssey" and "Iliad" (up from 43 percent to 59 percent) to the 2004 release of "Troy," a film adaptation of Homer's epic starring Pitt.

Similarly, a 2005 movie of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" starring Keira Knightley caused that book's stock to rise from 14 percent in 1985 to 23 percent among students surveyed in 2006.

"My favorite on that list is 'The Great Gatsby,' " said Heather Gagliardi, a junior marketing management major at Siena.

The pair supported a trend found in the survey, in which F. Scott Fitzgerald's iconic novel of the Jazz Age has scaled freshman reading lists, from 41 percent in 1985 to 59 percent in 2006. Gagliardi and Daversa each estimated they had read about half of the books on the list, although Siena students were not surveyed among a cross-section of colleges and universities from coast to coast.

Another factor in the decline of the literary canon, Kelly said, is the fallout of an ongoing cultural war.

"We get a lot of faculty writing in different books on our questionnaire, urging more diversity and women among the authors," he said. "The debate is over whether education ought to transmit culture or be an engine of social change. The latter camp would replace a classic 19th-century novel of manners with a contemporary novel about the war in Iraq."

Margaret Hannay, a professor of English who's been teaching a Great Books seminar at Siena for 20 years, has gradually begun to refine the literary canon to match the tastes of today's students.

"We've come to realize that the canon didn't represent all of human experience and we needed to incorporate more women, multicultural and modern writers," said Hannay.

This spring, Hannay will assign "Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest Gaines, a searing portrait of race relations in a Cajun community in Louisiana in the late 1940s, and "In the Time of Butterflies" by Julia Alvarez, about life under a dictatorship in the Dominican Republic.

Such tinkering with the Great Books would elicit a howl of protest from the protean literary critic Harold Bloom, the most famous defender of the literary canon, who referred to "the canonical sublime" in a 1995 lecture. He called his critics "cheerleaders of cultural resentment" and added, "They're not true feminists or Marxists. They're pseudo-feminists, pseudo-Marxists. Send them back to Paris."